Music Theory Online

The Online Journal of the Society for Music Theory

Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance

KEYWORDS: performance theory, work, text, script, analysis

ABSTRACT: The text-based orientation of traditional musicology and
theory hampers thinking about music as a performance art. Music can be
understood as both process and product, but it is the relationship between the
two that defines "performance" in the Western "art" tradition. Drawing on
interdisciplinary performance theory (particularly theatre studies, poetry
reading, and ethnomusicology), I set out issues and outline approaches for the
study of music as performance; by thinking of scores as "scripts" rather than
"texts," I argue, we can understand performance as a generator of social
meaning.

The Idol Overturned

[1] "The performer," Schoenberg is supposed to have said, "for
all his intolerable arrogance, is totally unnecessary except as his
interpretations make the music understandable to an audience unfortunate enough
not to be able to read it in print."(1) It's difficult to know quite how
seriously to take such a statement, or Leonard Bernstein's injunction
(Bernstein, of all people!) that the conductor "be humble before the
composer; that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience;
that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be made in the service of
the composer's meaning."(2) And it might be tempting to blame it all on
Stravinsky, who somehow elevated a fashionable anti-Romantic stance of the 1920s
into a permanent and apparently self-evident philosophy of music, according to
which "The secret of perfection lies above all in [the performer's]
consciousness of the law imposed on him by the work he is performing," so
that music should be not interpreted but merely executed.(3) Or if not on
Stravinsky, then on the rise of the recording industry, which has created a
performance style designed for infinite iterability, resulting over the course
of the twentieth century in a "general change of emphasis . . . from the characterization
of musical events to the reproduction of a text."(4)

[2] But in truth the idea that performance is essentially reproduction, and
consequently a subordinate if not actually redundant activity, is built into our
very language. You can "just play," but it's odd to speak of
"just performing": the basic grammar of performance is that you
perform something, you give a performance "of" something. In
other words, language leads us to construct the process of performance as
supplementary to the product that occasions it or in which it results; it is
this that leads us to talk quite naturally about music "and" its
performance, just as film theorists speak of the film "and" the music,
as if performance were not already integral to music (and music to film).
Language, in short, marginalizes performance.

[3] Much of the disquiet which musicology shared with other disciplines in
the 1990s revolved around the (Stravinskian) idea of music being some kind of
autonomous product. At stage center, the so-called "New" musicologists
focused on the impossibility of understanding music (or any other cultural
production) as truly autonomous, independent of the world within which it is
generated and consumed. Entering from the wings, so to speak, the philosopher
Lydia Goehr developed a critique of the concept of the reified musical work
which had more impact on musicologists than it did on philosophers.(5) In a
nutshell, she argued that the idea of the musical work (an entity which, in Stan
Godlovitch's words,(6) seems "not quite of this world") is not
intrinsic to music as a cultural practice, but is a strictly historical concept
associated with Western "art" music (hereafter WAM) since around 1800.
The idea of conceptualizing music as performance, increasingly central in
ethnomusicology, was not so strongly represented in the musicology of the 1990s,
or at least not directly so, but in a sense it was already implied in the
critique of the autonomous work: if the transcendence and permanence of musical
works was not some kind of inherent quality but an effect of social or
ideological construction, it followed that music was to be understood as in
essence less a product than a process, an intrinsically meaningful cultural
practice, much in the manner of religious ritual. Indeed one might think of
twentieth-century WAM musicians and audiences as jointly "performing"
music's autonomy, through the ritual of the concert hall, in the same sense that
the royal chapels and courts of the seventeenth century "performed"
monarchy.

[4] This emphasis on the performative dimension of music can also be seen as
the logical outcome of a number of developments and tensions within the
discipline. One of these was the enlargement of the repertory falling within a
broadly conceived musicological purview, reflecting (or contributing to)
contemporary trends in multicultural education: the idea of performance
"of," of performance reproducing a self-sufficient work, is at best
problematic and at worst nonsensical when applied to jazz, rock, or remix
culture. (There was a suspicion, deriving largely from ethnomusicology, that the
traditional musicological insistence on seeing music as product rather than
process represented a kind of cultural hegemony, an assertion of the values of
high over low art.) Another of these tensions had to do with what Glenn Gould
contemptuously referred to as "the class structure within the musical
hierarchy."(7) In its quest for historically authentic performances, the
subdiscipline of performance practice placed the musicologist in the combined
role of legislator and law enforcement officer; Richard Taruskin quotes the
definition given in the (old) New Grove Dictionary (performance practice
is concerned with "the amount and kind of deviation from a precisely
determined ideal tolerated . . . by composers"), and draws out the implied
premise: "Performers are essentially corrupters--deviants, in
fact."(8) As for theorists, the ideal of analytically-informed performance,
which was pursued with some vigor in the decade after the publication of Wallace
Berry's book on the subject, similarly placed the analyst in charge: Berry spoke
of "the path from analysis to performance,"(9)
but the chronological
sequence masks another expression of the hierarchy Gould complained about. Not
surprisingly, there was concern about the relationship between theory and
practice that this seemed to imply.

[5] It is tempting to say that all this is rather silly and that what is
needed is simply a proper sense of balance and mutual respect between musicians.
But that ignores the influence of what I referred to as the grammar of
performance: a conceptual paradigm that constructs process as subordinate to
product. That such a paradigm should be deeply built into musicology is not
surprising: the nineteenth-century origins of the discipline lie in an emulation
of the status and methods of philology and literary scholarship, as a result of
which the study of musical texts came to be modeled on the study of literary
ones. In effect, and however implausibly, we are led to think of music as we
might think of poetry, as a cultural practice centered on the silent
contemplation of the written text, with performance (like public poetry reading)
acting as a kind of supplement. Moreover the traditional orientation of
musicology towards the reconstruction and dissemination of authoritative texts
reflected a primary concern with musical works as the works of their composers,
understanding them as messages to be transmitted as faithfully as possible from
composer to audience. It follows then from what Peter Kivy calls "composer
worship"(10) that the performer becomes at best an intermediary, as
reflected in the quotation from Leonard Bernstein, and at worst a
"middleman":(11) someone who puts a markup on the product without
contributing anything to it, and who should accordingly be cut out wherever
possible (as in the Schoenberg quotation). The performer's only legitimate
aspiration thus becomes one of "transparency, invisibility, or personality
negation."(12)

[6] Nor does the case for the prosecution stop there. The idea of music being
some kind of intellectual property to be delivered securely from composer to
listener ties it into the wider structures and ideologies of capitalist society.
Matthew Head points out that musical works function like investments, generating
regular income; Jacques Attali that, through sheet music or sound recording,
musical experience can be endlessly deferred and stockpiled.(13) Music has
become part of an aesthetic economy defined by the passive and increasingly
private consumption of commodified products rather than through the active,
social processes of participatory performance.(14) In short, we seem to have
forgotten that music is a performance art at all, and more than that, we seem to
have conceptualized it in such a way that we could hardly think of it that way
even if we wanted to. Taruskin remarks that "the work-concept is hard to
bring up to the surface of consciousness,"(15) and in this context
performance emerges as a kind of deconstructive lever: writing from the
perspective of theater studies (but also taking in contemporary music and
dance), Nick Kaye characterizes performance as "a primary postmodern
mode," tracing the way in which the performance-oriented practices of
artists like Foreman, Cunningham, or Cage subvert the "discrete or bounded
'work of art'" definitive of modernism, or dissolve it into "the
contingencies and instabilities of the 'event' . . . penetrated by unstable and
unpredictable exchanges and processes."(16)

[7] Construed in the manner of critical theory as an act of resistance
against the authority and closure of the reified text, the cause of performance
becomes a vehicle for rehabilitating the interests of those marginalized by
traditional musicological discourse: not only performers themselves, obviously,
but also listeners, for in Robert Martin's words, "Performances . . .,
rather than scores, are at the heart of the listener's world. . . . [M]usical
works, in the listener's world, simply do not exist."(17) From this it
follows that "musical works are fictions that allow us to speak more
conveniently about performances," or as Christopher Small has it, that
"performance does not exist in order to present musical works, but rather,
musical works exist in order to give performers something to perform."(18)
With the idol of the reified work thus overturned, the inversion of the
performance "of" paradigm is complete. Whereas, in Small's almost
evangelical words, "Western classical music embodies a kind of society that
does not allow for mutual participation of all peoples because it is based upon
works, not interactions," in a more inclusive and creative society there
shall be "no such thing as a musical work, [but] only the activities of
singing, playing, listening [and] dancing."(19) Indeed, for Michel Chion
the "new sound reality" has already arrived, bringing with it a now
"standard form of listening . . . that is no longer perceived as a
reproduction, as an image (with all this usually implies in terms of loss and
distortion of reality), but as a more direct and immediate contact with the
event."(20) In this brave new world there is in Small's terminology not
music but musicking, in Taruskin's not things but acts,(21) in short, not
product but process.

Second Thoughts

[8] The problem with this kind of reconceptualization of music is obvious
enough. It inverts the performance "of" paradigm but otherwise leaves
everything intact; instead of fetishizing the text, to borrow Jim Samson's term,
it fetishizes the performance.(22)
If we are to develop a better nuanced
conception of musical performance, we shall have to concede some of the ground
we have just won.

[9] In the first place, we need to refine the idea that the musical work is
purely a construct of post-1800 WAM. A number of musicologists, among them Harry
White, have responded to Goehr by pointing out how many aspects of the work
concept can be traced in WAM prior to that date; Michael Talbot argues that the
essential transition was not from the absence to the presence of a work concept,
but rather from one centered on genre to one centered on the composer.(23) Then
again, the ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl points out that, if there are such
things as universals in music, a strong candidate is that "One does not
simply 'sing,' but one sings something."(24) But what matters is the
value that attaches to this something in the processes of performance and
reception. Robert Martin's work-free experience of music may occur, but arguably
not within the bounds of WAM where, however much you may be focusing on Rattle,
it is almost impossible to entirely forget that you are listening to Mahler's
Ninth (or, if you don't know what you are listening to, not to be wondering what
it is). When you listen to "Material Girl," by contrast, the work is
still there (though you may well not know that it was written by Peter Brown and
Robert Rans), but performance values come to the fore: product is no longer so
clearly separable from process, and there is a sense in which you might want to
say it was a different song if another singer covered it. And the so called
"process" music of the early minimalists represents an even more
thorough-going dispersal of product (though paradoxically underpinned by a very
traditional concept of authorial identity). In this way there is a continuum
between experiencing music as process and as product--a continuum that becomes
directly perceptible, for instance, as the characteristic phrases of "The
Star-Spangled Banner" emerge from the improvisatory context of Jimi
Hendrix's Atlanta performance, the sounds as it were condensing onto a
pre-existing musical object and being mentally reconfigured as a flood of
associations and connotations are brought into play.(25) Against such a
background what might be termed the all-singing, all-dancing model of
performance begins to look like a distinctly essentializing stereotype.

[10] Then again, post-1800 WAM is by no means a monolithic terrain. In a kind
of codicil to her 1992 book, Goehr distinguishes between "the perfect
performance of music" (the approach that "takes the 'of'
seriously," as she puts it), and "the perfect musical
performance" that "celebrates the 'lower' world of the human, the
ephemeral, and the active."(26) And her point, underscored by several of
the contributors to the Liverpool symposium on the musical work that I have
already cited, is that the "opus" tradition of nineteenth-century
music associated above all with Beethoven was complemented by a quite distinct,
performer-oriented tradition, associated with composer-pianists like Chopin and
Liszt but even better exemplified by such largely forgotten virtuosi as Thalberg,
Tausig, or (Anton) Rubinstein. If the paradigm of the "opus" tradition
is the Beethoven symphony, that of the virtuoso tradition is the variation set,
generally based on popular operatic melodies of the day but designed as a
vehicle for artistic display; if the first tradition is associated with the
single, authoritative text reproduced in performance, the second invokes the
multiplicity of texts normative in rock music, for example, but troubling to
musicologists trained in the philological tradition. Many of Chopin's and
Liszt's works survive in any number of different, equally authentic notated
versions, themselves the traces of different, equally authentic performances
(and the resonance with the Jamaican usage of 'version' to refer to the
intertextual practices of reggae is not inappropriate). If, to repeat Small's
words, musicking means that "musical works exist in order to give
performers something to perform," then there was musicking even within the
heartland of the musical work.(27)

[11] There is also another respect in which the complexity of WAM performance
has been underestimated. No one performance exhausts all the possibilities of a
musical work within the WAM tradition, and to this extent the performance might
be thought of as a subset of a larger universe of possibility. But a better way
of thinking this thought is that, as Godlovitch puts it, "works massively
underdetermine their performances."(28) There are decisions of dynamics and
timbre which the performer must make but which are not specified in the score;
there are nuances of timing that contribute essentially to performance
interpretation and that involve deviating from the metronomically-notated
specifications of the score. In ensemble music such unnotated but musically
significant values are negotiated between performers (that is a large part of
what happens in rehearsal). And as Kivy has observed,(29) there is a distinction
of scale but not of principle between such interpretive practices, which happen
so to speak within the interstices of notation, and the more drastic
reconfigurations of the score that are normal in the performance of a Corelli
violin sonata (where the continuo player will realize the figured bass and the
soloist may embellish the melody out of all recognition), or in the
interpretation of a jazz lead sheet: in each case the art of performance
inhabits a zone of free and yet musically significant choice that is established
in and around the notated work. (Kivy refers to this as the "gap between
'text' and performance," describing it as "a desired, intended
and logically required ontological fact."(30)) In fact it might be
argued that music is projected most strongly as an art of performance precisely
when the work itself is so familiar, so over-learned, that the individual
performance becomes the principal focus of the listener's attention. If, as
pessimistic commentators complain, the live orchestral repertory has diminished
to a handful of interminably repeated war-horses, then the result is a culture
oriented in the highest possible degree towards the experience of music as
performance (which explains the importance of brand marketing in the classical
music industry: it isn't so much Beethoven's Seventh Symphony that is being
sold, but rather the difference between Harnoncourt's and John Eliot Gardiner's
interpretations of it).(31)If that is the case, then there is a striking
mismatch between the largely performance-oriented manner in which such music is
experienced and the almost exclusively composer- or composition-oriented manner
in which it is represented in historical and critical writing.

[12] One way to respond to this situation is to see music as a tandem art:
there is the art of the composer, and there is the art of the performer.
According to Kivy, "as the music of our historical past has traditionally
been performed . . . we are in possession, always, of two artworks: the work of
music, and, given an outstanding or high-quality performance, the performance
(product) itself."(32) Two points need making here. First, by referring to
traditional performance, Kivy intends a contrast with the so-called historical
performance movement, which he sees as collapsing performance into text, so
squeezing out the gap between them and substituting one artwork for two.(33)
(The same might be said for wholly studio-based electroacoustic music.) The
second has to do with Kivy's curious formulation "the performance (product)
itself," which he elsewhere glosses as "the 'thing' the performer
produces in the act of performing."(34) Exactly what this "thing"
might be is never entirely clear, but Kivy provides a clue when he refers to the
quality that persists through Landowska's various performances of the
"Goldberg" Variations: performance is to be valued not as process but
for the interpretation it embodies.(35) Again, Kivy argues that performances are
versions of works in precisely the same sense as arrangements,(36) and this
means that he treats performance as a vicarious kind of composition; indeed he
claims that "Western performance practice tout court is the exercise
of a peripheral skill of the composer's art."(37) Leaving aside the
hierarchical implications of "peripheral," the result is exactly what
Kivy's reference to "two artworks" suggests: we have two products and
no process. In this way, we are back to music and performance, rather
than music as performance.

Music as Performance

[13] Keir Elam has written, with reference to theatrical performance, of the
"relationship of mutual and shifting constraints between two kinds of text,
neither of which is prior and neither of which is precisely 'immanent' within
the other, since each text is radically transformed by its relations with the
other."(38) Elam's formulation vividly captures the interaction which is
constitutive of music as (rather than "and") performance, but the
characterization of performance as "text," reminiscent of Kivy's
"performance (product)," is characteristic of an earlier phase in
theatrical semiotics (the Elam quotation dates from 1977). The contemporary
performance studies paradigm that has developed primarily in the context of
theater studies and ethnomusicology stresses the extent to which signification
is constructed through the very act of performance, and generally through acts
of negotiation between performers, or between them and the audience. In other
words performative meaning is understood as subsisting in process and hence by
definition irreducible to product; as Charles Bernstein expresses it with
reference to poetry reading, "Sound . . . can never be completely recuperated as ideas, as content, as narrative, as extralexical
meaning."(39) In many ways musicology's faltering advance towards a
performance studies paradigm, most visible perhaps in opera studies (where the
concept of the operatic "work" has largely given way to that of the
operatic event), replicates the breaking away of theater studies from literary
studies that took place during the last generation.(40)

[14] To understand music as performance means to see it as an irreducibly
social phenomenon, even when only a single individual is involved. (Again there
is a comparison with religious ritual, which involves the reproduction of
socially agreed forms of expression even when conducted in private.) This
observation derives its force from the extent to which the manifestly social
practice of music has been conceptualized in terms of a direct and private
communication from composer to listener. Because of this hierarchical
communication model (one that reflects the traditional alignment of divine and
human creation), even the everyday fact of divided authorship has been
problematic for the musical academy. Certain music theorists have attempted to
understand rock music as the creation of a single authorial persona ("the
band"), rather than accepting that it results from the interaction of
different individuals--not only the players but also, typically, producers,
managers, and A & R personnel.(41) A performance studies paradigm would turn
this upside down and emphasize the extent to which even a Beethoven symphony,
understood as a dynamic practice within contemporary culture rather than a
historical monument, represents the work not only of the composer but also of
performers, producers and engineers, editors, and commentators.

[15] To emphasize the irreducibly social dimension of musical performance is
not to deny the role of the composer's work, but it does have implications for
what sort of a thing we think the work is. Referring to one of the mostly
overtly interactive of musical practices, jazz improvisation, Ingrid Monson
writes that "the formal features of musical texts are just one aspect--a
subset, so to speak--of a broader sense of the musical, which also includes the
contextual and the cultural. Rather than being conceived as foundational or
separable from context, structure is taken to have as one of its central
functions the construction of social context."(42) Seen this way,
the term "text" (with its connotations of New Critical autonomy and
structuralism) is perhaps less helpful than a more distinctively theatrical
word, "script." Whereas to think of a Mozart quartet as a
"text" is to construe it as a half-sonic, half-ideal object reproduced
in performance, to think of it as a "script" is to see it as
choreographing a series of real-time, social interactions between players: a
series of mutual acts of listening and communal gestures that enact a particular
vision of human society, the communication of which to the audience is one of
the special characteristics of chamber music (the reproductive aspect is
arguably stronger in symphonic music).(43) It is in recognition of this kind of
performative meaning that non-musicological writers have often advocated the
same kind of retrenchment in the concept of the musical work that motivates my
use of the term "script"; Paul Val�ry compared a piece of music to a
recipe, R. G. Collingwood saw the score as a "rough outline" of
directions for performance, while Godlovitch refers to notated works as
"templates, sketches, outlines, or guides which, when consulted within the
bounds of conventional approval, hold promise for workable and working
music."(44)

[16] Musical works underdetermine their performances, but to think of their
notations as "scripts" rather than "texts" is not simply to
think of them as being less detailed. (As I mentioned, performance routinely
involves not playing what is notated as well as playing what is not notated; in
this sense there is an incommensurability between the detail of notation and
that of performance, so that notions of more or less are not entirely to the
point.) Rather, it implies a reorientation of the relationship between notation
and performance. The traditional model of musical transmission, borrowed from
philology, is the stemma: a kind of family tree in which successive
interpretations move vertically away from the composer's original vision. The
text, then, is the embodiment of this vision, and the traditional aim of source
criticism is to ensure as close an alignment as possible between the two, just
as the traditional aim of historically-informed performance is to translate the
vision into sound. But the performance studies paradigm in effect turns this
model through ninety degrees: as Richard Schechner expresses it, it emphasizes
"explorations of horizontal relationships among related forms rather
than a searching vertically for unprovable origins."(45) In other words, it
seeks to understand performances in relation to other performances (Schechner's
"related forms") rather than in relation to the original vision
supposedly embodied in an authoritative text; a given performance of Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony, for example, acquires its meaning from its relationship to the
horizon of expectations established by other performances. (It is easy to
recognize this in relation to such obviously anomalous interpretations as
Mengelberg's, but I am suggesting that the same applies to all
performances, so that if we hear Karajan's Ninth as simply a performance
"of" the Ninth that is because we are unconscious of the weight of
tradition within which we are immersed.(46)) But more than this, the shift from
seeing performance as the reproduction of texts to seeing it a cultural practice
prompted by scripts results in the dissolving of any stable distinction between
work and performance.

[17] Busoni, for Samson the archetypal representative of performance culture,
refused to admit any ontological distinction between scores, performances, and
arrangements, because he saw all of them as equally transcriptions of an
abstract, platonic idea; as John Williamson points out, the result is not only a
blurring of the distinction between composition and performance, but also a
"confusion of the roles of editor, transcriber, and composer, whereby a
'work' may be a variant, completion, or complete rethinking of a pre-existing
work."(47) Current performance theory reaches exactly the same conclusion
from exactly the opposite premise: there is no ontological distinction between
the different modes of a work's existence, its different instantiations, because
there is no original. Charles Bernstein invokes Alfred Lord's study of the
Homerian epic in order to oppose the reduction of poem to text: "I
believe," wrote Lord, "that once we know the facts of oral composition
we must cease to find an original of any traditional song. From an oral
point of view each performance is original."(48) And Godlovitch sees
the related practice of story-telling as the best model for musical performance,
not only because it emphasizes presentation, skill, and communication, but also
because "this view of the relationship between works and performances puts
the former in their proper musical place primarily as vehicles and opportunities
for the latter in the larger business of making music."(49) Godlovitch's
formulation, however, would be more accurate if he spoke of the relationship
between "scripts," not works, and performances: after all, if there is
no original, or if as Lord puts it each performance is original, then instead of
a single work located "vertically" in relation to its performances we
have an unlimited number of ontologically equivalent instantiations, all
existing on the same "horizontal" plane. Again the story-telling model
shows what is at stake: Barbara Herrnstein Smith's demonstration that there is
no such thing as "the" story of Cinderella but only an
indefinite number of versions of it (paralleled by Charles Seeger's judgment
that "no such entity as 'the "Barbara Allen" tune' can be
set up other than for temporary convenience") suggests that the only viable
model for the musical work is the Wittgensteinian "family
resemblances" one, and indeed a number of musicologists have invoked family
resemblances in this context.(50)

[18] Or have we moved too fast and too far? Is it really credible to claim
that we have no "original" in the case of, say, the Ninth Symphony
when we have Beethoven's text? I have two answers to this question. The first,
which might seem rather quibbling, is that there is no such thing as Beethoven's
text, except as in interpretive construct; there is an autograph score, there
are a few autograph parts and a larger number of non-autograph ones, and a
variety of copyists' scores, but all of them contradict one another to a greater
or lesser degree. And to see this as the kind of transient difficulty that can
be put right by a proper critical edition is to miss the point: Herrnstein Smith
would say that the Urtext editions of Beethoven's symphonies that are at
last beginning to appear do not replace the earlier texts, but just add new
ones. (So perhaps this answer was not so quibbling after all.) The second answer
is that while these historically privileged texts have a particular significance
and authority within the field encompassed by the Ninth Symphony, they are not
ontologically distinct from any other occupant of that field: scores and
performances, with their different patterns of determinacy and indeterminacy,
their different construals of what is essential or inessential to the Symphony's
identity, are linked to one another only by virtue of acts of interpretation,
resulting in just the kind of intertextual field to which Keir Elam referred.
(It is because the relationship of score to performance necessarily involves
interpretation that even WAM might be seen as essentially an oral tradition, no
matter how closely prompted by notation.) In a passage which I have quoted so
often that I might as well quote it once more, Lawrence Rosenwald has
characterized the identity of the Ninth Symphony as "something existing in
the relation between its notation and the field of its performances,"(51)
and this precisely captures what I am trying to convey: that Beethoven's text
(whatever that means) has an obviously privileged role and yet relates
horizontally, as Schechner would put it, to the symphony's other instantiations.
In other words, the work does not exist "above" the field of its
instantiations, but is simply coterminous with its totality--which, of course,
is why the Ninth Symphony is still evolving. There is a sense, then, in which to
refer (like Godlovitch) to "work and performance" is just as
wrong-headed as speaking of "music and performance."

[19] At the same time, to construe music as performance in this manner,
rather than as the reproduction through performance of some kind of imaginary
object, is not to devalue works (as Godlovitch arguably does in describing them
as primarily vehicles and opportunities for performances). In fact I would argue
the opposite. That music is a performing art is self-evident as soon as you say
it; it is only the literary orientation of musicology that makes us need to say
it in the first place. In such a context the fact that, as Kaye constantly
reiterates, performance tends to undermine the closure and quiddity of the
textual object is hardly to be wondered at; what is to be wondered at is
the way in which the real-time process of performance routinely leaves not a
few, fragmentary memories (like a holiday, say) but rather the sense that we
have experienced a piece of music, an imaginary object that somehow
continues to exist long after the sounds have died away. "The belief that
quartets and symphonies of Mozart and Beethoven rise above history can never be
completely erased," Charles Rosen declares, because "the autonomy was
written into them."(52) Rosen's confident tone belies the fragility of this
snatching of eternity, so to speak, from the jaws of evanescence. It is only
when you conceptualize performance as process that you realize how
extraordinarily compelling the central illusion of WAM, that of music as
product, can be.

[20] And yet, in the end, the distinction between product and process does
not really hold up. Schechner sees it as a matter of emphasis: some cultures
emphasize the dramatic text, others the theatrical performance.(53)
In the same
way, Goehr's "perfect performance of music" and "perfect musical
performance" might be seen not as opposed paradigms but rather as
contrasted emphases, opposed but in the sense of occupying distinct positions
within a continuum (with Stockhausenian elektronische Musik and free
improvisation perhaps defining its limits). Seen this way, process and product
form an insoluble amalgam: Andrew Benjamin speaks, with reference to poetry, of
"[t]he presence of the text . . . within the performance but equally the
presence of the performance inside the text,"(54) and the same applies to
music. But it is in the case of recordings that product and process have become
most inextricably intertwined. The recording (a marketable product) purports to
be the trace of a performance (process), but is in reality usually the composite
product of multiple takes and more or less elaborate sound processing--in other
words, less a trace than the representation of a performance that never actually
existed.(55) And as recording increasingly replaces live performance as the
paradigmatic form of music's existence, so we come closer to Chion's "new
sound reality," which I cited as the purest form of music as process; but
Chion's point is that there is no longer any distinction between presentation
and representation, which means that it would make equal sense to describe it as
the purest form of music as product. Pushed to such limits the concept of
performance, as embodied in the WAM tradition, loses its substance. Process and
product, then, are not so much alternative options as complementary strands of
the twisted braid we call performance.

Studying Music as Performance

[21] But how might all this affect how we actually study music? In the space
that remains I can do no more than offer a few pointers or links. But the most
obvious way of studying music as performance is, quite simply, to study those
traces or representations of past performances that make up the recorded
heritage, thereby unlocking an archive of acoustical texts comparable in extent
and significance to the notated texts around which musicology originally came
into being. And this is beginning to happen, not only as a result of forces
within the discipline but also in response to the initiatives of recording
libraries anxious to encourage scholarly exploitation of their resources (the
National Sound Archive in London being a particular case in point).

[22] Enough work of this kind has been carried out, some of it involving
computer-based analysis of performance timing, that the drawbacks are beginning
to appear. You can work with large numbers of recordings, in the manner of
Robert Philip or Jos� Bowen;(56) this approach directly reflects the idea of
music as a horizontal field of instantiations, and allows for a range of
stylistic measures and the extrapolation of statistical trends, but an
essentially inductive approach of this kind does not easily provide the kind of
insight into the specific qualities of specific interpretations that score-based
analysis characteristically offers. (It suffers, in short, from the traditional
problems of style analysis.) The alternative is to seek to relate performance
interpretation to the available analytical readings of a particular composition,(57) in effect working from analysis to recording; here the danger
is of replicating Berry's "path from analysis to performance" and so
interpreting the relationship purely vertically, to repeat Schechner's term.(58)
It is likely that, as the field develops, ways will be found of combining what
might be termed the inductive and the deductive modes of performance analysis,
but a further problem remains: the assumption, common to writers as otherwise
dissimilar as Schenker, Stein, Narmour, and Berry, that the role of performance
is in some more or less straightforward manner to express, project, or
"bring out" compositional structure. The universal validity of this
orthodoxy is not self-evident, and there have been some explorations of the idea
that performers might equally well seek to play against, rather than with,
structure.(59) But of course this kind of inversion leaves the basic
paradigm--the musical equivalent of what Susan Melrose calls the "page to
stage" approach--in place: performance remains a supplement.(60) Pursued in
this manner, performance studies might well become established as a specialist
area within musicology and theory, but with little impact on the overwhelmingly
textualist orientation of the discipline as a whole.

[23] A more direct route to understanding music as performance might be to
focus on the functioning of the performing body, both in itself and in relation
to the other dimensions of the performance event.(61) But again the conceptual
framework is crucial. Melrose observes that structuralist approaches to
theatrical performance attributed significance to the body only to the extent
that they constructed it as "text" (and a similar complaint might be
made about the approaches to performance timing I have just mentioned).(62) The
contemporary performance studies paradigm, by contrast, seeks to understand the
body in the same way as it understands sound, as a site of resistance to text,
for as Charles Bernstein puts it, "Sound is language's flesh, its opacity,
as meaning marks its material embeddedness in the world of things."(63) And
in both cases performance is understood to be in "fundamental opposition to
the desire for depth," for, in Simon Frith's words, "if we are
moved by a performer we are moved by what we immediately see and
hear."(64) Instead of seeing the relationship between work and performance
in terms of a transparent revelation of underlying structure, as epitomized by
the Schenkerian concept of performing from the middleground, a variety of terms
come into play which thematize the opacity of the relationship: quotation,
commentary, critique, parody, irony, or travesty, for example.(65)

[24] But there is a further vital conceptual ingredient. Melrose quotes
Ariane Mnouchkine's observation that "the goal of text analysis is to
attempt to explain everything. Whereas the role of the actor . . . is not at all
to explicate the text."(66) But it is just this distinction that
theoretical approaches to musical performance generally seek to deny. After all,
you cannot perform from the middleground unless you have an authoritative
knowledge of the text, and William Rothstein reveals the assumption that this is
the foundation of articulate performance when he says (by way of the exception
which proves the rule) that it is sometimes better to conceal than to project
structure: on such occasions, he says, "the performer adopts temporarily
the viewpoint of one or two characters in the drama, so to speak, rather than
assuming omniscience at every moment."(67) By comparison, a postmodern
approach, as advocated by Kevin Korsyn, would question the possibility of what
he calls "a central point of intelligibility, a privileged position for the
spectator"--or, in this case, the performer.(68) As might be expected,
Korsyn invokes Bahktin's concept of dialogic in order to make his point, drawing
a comparison between music and Bakhtin's concept of novelistic discourse as
"an artistically organized system for bringing different languages in
contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of
one language by means of another."(69) This image of different languages
being brought into contact with one another--an image strikingly similar to the
Elam quotation with which I began the previous section--provides a fertile
framework for the analysis of musical performance, and indeed it is hard to
think of an area in which the Bahktinian concepts of heteroglossia and
double-voiced discourse might be applied in a more literal manner.

[25] This is a less than original observation. Richard Middleton has
appropriated Bakhtin's concepts for the analysis of popular music, linking them
to Henry Louis Gates Jr's concept of "Signifyin(g)"; Monson has made
the same linkage in connection with the tissue of intertextual reference that is
jazz improvisation, also adding W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of African-American
"double-consciousness" into the mix.(70) Such approaches not only add
depth to such concepts as parody, irony, and the rest, but also throw the
emphasis firmly on the quality of creativity, of performative difference, which
Gates invokes when he defines Signifyin(g) as "[r]epetition with a signal
difference";(71) this semiotically charged figuring of iteration as
commentary, ventriloquism, or even impersonation lies at the heart of, for
instance, Hendrix's Monterey covers of "Like a Rolling Stone" or
"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."(72) That approaches such as
these, developed for the articulation of characteristic features of
African-American culture, should be well adapted for the analysis of jazz and
popular music is not surprising. I would go further, however, and suggest that
just as the spread of African-American musical practices has gone far towards
establishing a global lingua franca, so the concepts of Signifyin(g) and
double-consciousness can help to articulate the creativity that has always been
present in the performance culture of WAM, but has long been repressed by the
text-dominated discourses of musicology. Or to put it another way, thinking of
WAM performances as reproductions may be less useful than thinking of them as
monolithic, culturally privileged instances of intertextual reference.

[26] The issue of omniscience, of the availability or otherwise of a central
point of intelligibility, also has a direct effect upon the relationship between
the performance analyst and the phenomena that analyst is investigating, and it
is the component of the contemporary performance studies synthesis that I have
not yet directly discussed that makes this clearest: ethnomusicology. Through
its functionalist orientation (that is, its insistence on understanding any
practice within the totality of its cultural context), ethnomusicology from the
start distanced itself from the model of detached observation and synthesis that
characterized its predecessor discipline, comparative musicology. Instead it
emphasized the necessity of fieldwork, understood as a prolonged period of
residency within the target culture, during which musical practices would be
observed in their cultural context and an understanding of native
conceptualization acquired. Nevertheless the aim remained one of, if not
omniscience, then at least an authoritative and objective understanding of
cultural practice.

[27] More recent approaches to fieldwork, however, question the availability
of such a central point of intelligibility in just the same way that Korsyn
does; it is for this reason that Michelle Kisliuk describes the claim of
ethnomusicological and other ethnography "to interpret reality for
its 'informants'" as a "pretense."(73) The result is that, in
Jeff Todd Titon's words, "Fieldwork is no longer viewed principally as
observing and collecting (although it surely involves that) but as experiencing
and understanding music," and he continues: "The new fieldwork leads
us to ask what it is like for a person (ourselves included) to make and to know
music as lived experience."(74) In a word, it stresses personal participation
in the performative generation of meaning that is music, and as most
conspicuously represented by such books as Kisliuk's Seize the Dance! it
gives rise to a literary practice that is as close to travel writing or even
autobiography as to the traditional literature of ethnomusicology, and which is
also acutely conscious of its performative nature as writing.(75) As Titon puts
it, citing Geertz, the performative approach "forces us to face the fact
that we are primarily authors, not reporters."(76)

[28] Applied to more traditional musicological contexts, an ethnographic
approach questions conventional constructions of relevance. For the drama
theorist Baz Kershaw, it is "a fundamental tenet of performance theory . .
. that no item in the environment of performance can be discounted as irrelevant
to its impact," and Charles Bernstein provides an all too graphic
illustration of what this might mean when he characterizes "gasps,
stutters, hiccups, burps, coughs, slurs, microrepetitions, oscillations in
volume, 'incorrect' pronunciations, and so on" as "semantic features
of the performed poem . . . and not as extraneous interruption."(77) The
point Bernstein is making is that "one of the primary techniques of poetry
performance is the disruption of rationalizable patterns of sound through the
intervallic irruption of acoustic elements not recuperable by monological
analysis,"(78) and one might say that in music the performance
"of" paradigm--the equivalent of Bernstein's "monological
analysis"--filters out such dimensions of performance as are not directly referable
to the work being performed. An ethnographic approach, by contrast, seeks to
understand the performance of a particular piece in the context of the total
performance event, encompassing issues of program planning, stage presentation,
dress, articulation with written texts, and so forth. To date, work of this kind
is more familiar in the context of popular music than of WAM, and the work of
Les Back offers a representative example which parallels both Kisliuk's
self-consciously performative writing and, in its invocation of Deleuze and
Guattari's cultural "rhizomes," Schechner's concept of the horizontal:
Back shows by such means how the performances of the Birmingham (U.K.)-based
musician Apache Indian function as an arena for complex negotiations of cultural
identity reflecting, as he puts it, "a diasporic triple consciousness
that is simultaneously the child of Africa, Asia, and Europe."(79)

[29] For the musicologist such work may be simultaneously stimulating,
because of the virtuosity with which cultural meaning is read in the
multifarious dimensions of the performance event, and frustrating, because of
its lack of engagement with the specifics of music. How might we put the music
back into performance analysis? One model is provided by Monson's analyses of
jazz improvisation, in which extended transcriptions are aligned with prose
commentary and counterpointed by quotations from and discussions of performers'
discourse. (The main limitation in Monson's presentation is the distance between
sound and transcription: a musicology of performance really demands the
integration of sound, word, and image achievable through current hypermedia
technology, though inhibited by copyright and implementation costs,
distribution, and the criteria of academic accreditation.) Again, the kind of
communicative interaction between performers that Chris Smith has analyzed in
relation to Miles Davis(80) is equally evident within the dynamics of, to repeat
my previous example, a string quartet playing Mozart: here there is an
opportunity to combine ethnographic and traditional music-theoretical
approaches, as well as the computer-based measurement of timing to which I have
already referred, in an analysis of the relationship between notated
"script" and social interaction. (If this kind of work is harder with
the WAM repertory than with jazz improvisation, because of the danger of
relapsing into the performance "of" paradigm, then a useful halfway
house is offered by analysis of the longitudinal processes by which WAM
interpretations come into being, that is, of rehearsal; this is a topic already
attracting interest from music theorists, psychologists, and sociologists,
though still primarily at the level of grant applications and work-in-progress
presentations.)

[30] But analyzing music as performance does not necessarily mean analyzing
specific performances or recordings at all. John Potter offers an analysis of a
passage from Antoine Brumel's Missa Victimae Paschali which focuses on
the intimate negotiations and conjunctions between the performers and the manner
in which these inflect the performance: "Throughout," he writes,
"the voices are setting up patterns of tension and relaxation, acutely
conscious of each other, both seeking to accommodate each others' desires and to
satisfy themselves."(81) At the end of the first bar, a particular
dissonance "is only a passing moment but it creates a moment of acute
pleasure that they may wish to prolong," thereby subverting the tempo;(82)
the third voice (with successive eighth notes on the first beat of the following
bar) has to re-establish the tempo, but by the suspension at the end of the bar
it is the superius who controls the negotiations of tempo between the
performers. "I have not chosen an actual performance," Potter writes,
"since the potential degree of realization of the points I wish to make
will vary from performance to performance."(83) But the points themselves
are scripted in Brumel's music: that is, they can be recovered from the score
provided the analyst has the requisite knowledge of performance practice (Potter
is a professional singer whose experience ranges from medieval music to
"Tommy"), and provided that the dissonances in question are understood
not just as textual features, as attributes of the musical object, but as
prompts to the enaction of social relationships in the real time of performance.

[31] And the analysis of social interaction between performers offered by
writers like Potter and Monson prompts a final thought on the potential of
performance analysis for a culturally-oriented musicology. The underlying
objective of such a musicology--to understand music as both reflection and
generator of social meaning--is most ambitiously expressed in Adorno's claim
that music "presents social problems through its own material and according
to its own formal laws--problems which music contains within itself in the
innermost cells of its technique."(84) Music, in other words, becomes a
resource for understanding society. Adorno's own analyses of music have proved a
constant source of frustration, however, while even his apologist Rose Subotnik
has described his concept of the interface between music and society as
"indirect, complex, unconscious, undocumented, and mysterious."(85)
But the problem disappears if instead of seeing musical works as texts within
which social structures are encoded we see them as scripts in response to which
social relationships are enacted: the object of analysis is now present and
self-evident in the interactions between performers, and in the acoustic trace
that they leave. To call music a performing art, then, is not just to say that
we perform it; it is to say that music performs meaning.

11. Godlovitch, 81, quoting the Harvard Dictionary of Music (see also
Kivy, Authenticitiesi, 282).Return to text

12. Lydia Goehr, "The Perfect Performance of Music and the Perfect
Musical Performance," New Formations 27 (1996), 11.Return to text

13. Matthew Head, "Music with 'No Past'? Archaeologies of Joseph Haydn
and The Creation," 19th-Century Music 23 (2000), 200; Jacques
Attali,
Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1985), 32 and passim.Return to text

17. Robert L. Martin, "Musical Works in the Worlds of Performers and
Listeners," in Michael Krausz, ed., The Interpretation of Music:
Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 121, 123.Return to text

27. For an exemplary discussion of variants in Chopin, see Jeffrey Kallberg, Chopin
at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1996), chapter 7. It is worth adding that even a
performer as closely associated (through Brahms) with the "opus"
tradition as Clara Wieck/Schumann treated musical texts with the kind of
flexibility that one might rather associate with the virtuoso tradition (see
Valerie Goertzen, "Setting the Stage: Clara Schumann's Preludes," in In
the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation,
ed. Bruno Nettl and Melinda Russell [Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998], 237-60); the fact that such practices just failed to survive into the era
of recording has given a false impression of the variety of attitudes to the
notated text current in the nineteenth century.Return to text

31. More accurately, one might say that brand marketing dominates new
releases, whereas composer- and repertory-oriented marketing dominates the back
lists (and most music outside the central canon); I owe this observation, and
others, to Uri Golomb, and would also like to acknowledge Tom Service's
influence in exploring this field.Return to text

38. Quoted in Elaine Aston and George Savona, Theatre as Sign-System: A
Semiotics of Text and Performance (London: Routledge, 1991), 104.Return to text

39. Charles Bernstein, ed., Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 21.Return to text

40. For a vivid account of what is at stake here, with particular reference
to Shakespeare, see Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History
from the Restoration to the Present (London: Hogarth Press, 1989), chapter
6.Return to text

43. Such generalizations could of course benefit from historical refinement;
for example, Philip stresses the much more heterogeneous ensemble of 1920s
string quartets (with frequent and uncoordinated portamento) as compared with
today's, and quotes the Vienna correspondent of the Musical Times writing
in 1930 that "Toscanini's watchword is unconditional subordination of his
men [the New York Orchestra]; the Vienna men [Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra] are
given the liberty to 'sing' to their heart's content, to be co-ordinate, not
subordinate to their leader" (Philip, 234, 233).Return to text

46. While performance is an inherently intertextual practice, this argument
applies with particular force to performance in the age of mechanical
reproduction; it seems likely that the continued circulation of past
performances, in the form of recordings, resulted in individual works acquiring
increasingly diversified performance histories. One of the principal problems in
writing the history of performance is the extent to which such individual
"work histories" can be subsumed within a generalized "style
history" (a point discussed by Jos� Bowen, with specific reference to
tempo, in "Tempo, Duration, and Flexibility: Techniques in the Analysis of
Performance," Journal of Musicological Research 16 (1996), 111-56);
paradoxically, this suggests a context within which the work concept,
comprehensively deconstructed as an aesthetic and analytical category, may need
to be reinstated as a historical one. Return to text

47. Williamson, "The Musical Artwork and its Materials in the Music and
Aesthetics of Busoni," in The Musical Work, ed. Talbot, 187. Return to text

49. Godlovitch, "Perfect Performance," 96, almost repeating Small's remark about works being there
to give performers something to perform.Return to text

50. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, "Narrative Versions, Narrative
Theories," Critical Inquiry 7 (1980), 213-236; Charles Seeger, Studies
in Musicology 1935-75 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 316.
For further discussion, with references, see Nicholas Cook, "At the Borders
of Musical Identity: Schenker, Corelli, and the Graces," Music Analysis
18 (1999), 309-12, and for a more recent invocation of family resemblances
Richard Middleton, "Work-in-(g) Practice: Configuration of the Popular
Music Intertext," in The Musical Work, ed. Talbot, 60.Return to text

55. David R. Shumway points out that, despite the fact that most popular
music (including rock) is a studio creation, critics and audiences persist in
conceiving recordings as reproduced performances ("Performance," in Key
Terms in Popular Music and Culture, ed. Bruce Horner and Thomas Swiss
[Malden, Mass.: Blackwells, 1999], 192); Gould saw Central European recordings
of classical music as designed to create the illusion of live performance in a
way that their more frankly studio-oriented Western European and American
counterparts were not (Page, ed., Glenn Gould Reader, 333-4). In many popular music genres, and
increasingly in WAM too, there is a further twist: the live performance becomes
a reproduction of the recording, so paradoxically reinstating the performance
"of" paradigm.Return to text

56. As well as "Tempo, Duration, and Flexibility," see his
"Finding the Music in Musicology: Performance History and Musical
Works," in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 424-51.Return to text

57. See, e.g., Joel Lester, "Performance and Analysis: Interaction and
Interpretation," in The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical
Interpretation, ed. John Rink (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
197-216; Nicholas Cook, "The Conductor and the Theorist: Furtw�ngler,
Schenker and the First Movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony," in Practice of
Performance, ed. Rink, 105-25.Return to text

58. If it were as easy to derive an analysis from a performance as to match a
performance to an analysis then one would at least be replicating only the
orientation, and not the one-way direction, of Berry's path, but this is not the
case; for a discussion see Nicholas Cook, "Words About Music, or Analysis
Versus Performance," in Theory into Practice: Composition, Performance,
and the Listening Experience, ed. Nicholas Cook, Peter Johnson, and Hans
Zender (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1999), 48-49.Return to text

61. See for example Eric Clarke and Jane Davidson, "The Body in
Performance," in Composition-Performance-Reception: Studies in the
Creative Process in Music, ed. Wyndham Thomas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998),
74-92.Return to text

62. Melrose, Semiotics of the Dramatic Text, 210. The same might also be said of such studies of dance as
Janet Adshead, ed., Dance Analysis: Theory and Practice (London: Dance
Books, 1988) and Graham McFee, Understanding Dance (London: Routledge,
1992), the second of which goes to extraordinary lengths to understand it in
terms of Goodmanian notationality. Return to text

65. Serge Lacasse offers a taxonomy of such categories with specific
reference to popular music, and introduces the useful concept of "transtylization":
this is a measure of the degree of transformation involved in any particular
intertextual practice, so that for example a tribute band "aims at a degr�
z�ro of transtylization" ("Intertextuality and Hypertextuality in
Recorded Popular Music," in The Musical Work, ed. Talbot, 54).Return to text

70. Middleton, "Work-in-(g) Practice," 73-6; Monson, Saying
Something, 98-106. For a further invocation of Bakhtin in
the context of performance analysis generally and jazz in particular, though focusing
more on Bakhtin's concept of "utterance," see Jos� Bowen, "The
History of Remembered Innovation: Tradition and its Role in the Relationship
between Musical Works and their Performances," Journal of Musicology
11 (1993), 143-44. Return to text

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